John Rentoul: Gordon Brown's Japanese lesson

Tomorrow, Gordon Brown can make an old man happy. "Mr Fukuda," he can say, as he shakes the hand of the Japanese Prime Minister, who is visiting No 10, "I am even more unpopular than you."

Brown will be familiar with much of what has happened in recent Japanese politics, because he has lived through it in our parallel island kingdom, which seems to be about nine months behind theirs.

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Junichiro Koizumi was the hip, telegenic, Cliff Richard fan, a popular modernising prime minister who finally stepped down after a long spell in the top job in September 2006. He was a friend of Tony Blair's.

Cherie tells the story in her memoirs of Koizumi's teasing Jacques Chirac when London won the Olympics. "What do you think, Jacques?" Koizumi said in a voice that was "loud enough for everyone to hear, including the Queen", who was hosting a dinner at the Gleneagles G8 summit. "Very good food here!" Chirac had just closed Paris's pitch for the Games by saying of Britain that, "after Finland, it's the country with the worst food". As Cherie pointed out, he thereby ensured that Finland's two votes went to London.

Anyway, Koizumi was replaced by Shinzo Abe, a colourless and uncharismatic technocrat who was a member of the same faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Within weeks, the LDP was losing ground in the opinion polls.

Then disaster struck as – and I am not making this up – the Japanese government admitted that it had lost the pension records of 50 million people. Twice as many as were potentially affected by the loss of the child benefit discs in this country. Abe promised to try to sort out the mess, but in the summer of last year his party lost control of the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Japanese parliament.

The Japanese media were full of speculation that this setback – the first time the LDP had lost the upper house in its history – would force Abe from office. But he vowed to fight on and, if there were any plots against him, the plotters stayed their hand.

In August, Abe reshuffled his cabinet, but it had no effect on his party's dire poll ratings; and two weeks later, a year after he became prime minister, Abe suddenly called a news conference. "In the current situation, it is difficult boldly to implement policies without the people's support and confidence," he said. Taking everyone by surprise, he said he was standing down.

"Perhaps Mr Abe, or more importantly those around him, realised that with him at the helm the ship would founder," wrote Chris Hogg, the BBC's correspondent. Abe was having trouble getting a Bill through parliament to allow Japan's navy to carry on supporting international forces in Afghanistan.

It seemed as if anyone but Abe could do a better job as PM. So Yasuo Fukuda took over, nine months ago, in a test case for what we call over here the Blairite thesis that, if a prime minister isn't working, get a new one. Any new one.

"We must attend to the deep wounds that our party has suffered," Fukuda said. "Our policies going forward must reflect our apologies." This, though, is where the story gets better for Brown, who might derive his own gallows satisfaction from meeting Fukuda tomorrow.

Because it didn't get better for the LDP. Going on from opinion polls that were merely disastrous, the party is now plumbing record-breaking depths. At the end of April, the LDP lost an important by-election to the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan. Government approval sank as low as 20 per cent, the lowest since Japanese opinion polls began, and fully 10 points lower than the 30 per cent rating that was enough to force Abe from office.

Having changed leaders twice, each time for the worse, the Japanese government seems to have run out of options. This parliament still has another 16 months to run, until September next year, and the opposition, in predictably high spirits, is demanding an early election.

Step forward Kaoru Yosano, the Jack Straw of Japanese politics, someone who, as my esteemed colleague Alan Watkins notes on page 57, has always been around. Yosano is a "grey suit" of the LDP hierarchy, who said: "I think we should continue this administration until as close as possible to the end of term ... and wait for the support rate to rise."

So Brown might manage a wry smile when he and Fukuda shake hands for the traditional photograph in front of the Downing Street fireplace. Two prime ministers whose senior colleagues have little more substantial to offer than to "wait for the support rate to rise".

What, then, is the moral of the story? Brown would like us to think that it is this: having made the mistake of dumping one prime minister, do not compound it by dumping another.

I am not so sure. The lesson seems to be more that Brown has made himself and his Government even more unpopular than the Japanese have managed by making the wrong choice of prime minister twice.

There may be a more important lesson. I don't know enough about Japanese politics, but it would seem that the LDP lacks a "new Koizumi" to get the party back to its modernising, election-winning ways. Labour is in a better position, in two respects.

One is that a "new Blair" is not quite what Labour needs. Unlike Koizumi, Blair had become unpopular by the time he went. The other is that Labour has at least three potential prime ministers who are "not quite a new Blair", and who could, if they and the party get it right, do better than Brown.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, is, for example, more left wing than Blair. Ben Wegg-Prosser, another former Blair adviser, last week confirmed that Miliband had been considered by Blair for promotion to Foreign Secretary in 2006, when Margaret Beckett was appointed instead. More puzzling was Blair's failure to make him Education Secretary in 2004, when he chose Ruth Kelly instead. Did Blair think him too left wing?

Miliband makes an important appearance on the BBC's Question Time this week. It will be his first return to the programme since he said last February: "I predict that when I come back on this programme in six months' time or a year, people will be saying, 'Wouldn't it be great to have that Blair back because we can't stand that Gordon Brown?'"

What was interesting about that prediction is not that the second part was so right, but that the first part was so wrong. Despite a few columns, such as Iain McWhirter's "bring back Tony Blair" in this week's New Statesman, Blair nostalgia is conspicuous by its absence.

The fact is that Blairism had run its course. As one of Blair's inner circle told me, Brown had the chance to renew New Labour by dropping the bits people didn't like, and claiming to be continuity and change at the same time. He blew it.

But it would be overly deterministic to say that if Labour did change its leader a second time the new prime minister would continue to make and intensify the mistakes he has made. The party may seem to be all over the place at the moment, with tax cutters and radical egalitarians apparently at odds in every "Whither Labour?" seminar and think piece. But I don't believe that Miliband, or James Purnell or Alan Johnson, would be doomed to make that confusion worse if one of them them succeeded Brown at some point in the next year or so.

The true lesson of recent Japanese politics is this: if the Labour Party dumps Brown, it shouldn't replace him with the 71-year-old son of a former prime minister.

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